Tag Archives: eBay

A monthly round up of retail industry news, insights and trends buzzing on my radar….ICYMI

1 Amazon’s magic mirror

News of Amazon’s magic mirror patent kicked off the ‘new year new you’ fashion-tech conversation. A report on Engadget examined how consumers might soon see a blended virtual reality image of themselves combined with their Alexa Echo Look device that suggests likely outfits of the day. Just another step further into our wardrobes for Amazon’s all encompassing eco-system.

Amazon’s Echo Look could get its own mirror companion soon

2 Voice-commerce at CES

Voice-commerce was a major retail-tech trend at this year’s CES according to JWT Intelligence….as a host of new gadgets or appliances featuring either Amazon Echo or Google Assistant voice-control technology launched to market, signalling we have reached critical mass for voice-command searches and functionality through Internet of Things connected devices.

LG’s CLOI smart home robot CES

3 The YSL Beauté hotel

Luxury beauty brands are moving from ambassador-heavy pop-up events to more interactive, experiential parties where clients are meant to ‘live the brand’. Yves Saint Laurent Beauté launched an extension of its 2017 Beauty Club event format – a four-day pop-up hotel held during this month’s Paris Fashion Week – that was intended for guests to experiment with the brand’s services and products, create digital content for social media, but not make any purchases. This was a strategic shift away from storytelling, moving into more ‘storyliving’ according to Stephan Bezy, international general manager Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, in an interview with WWD.

YSL Beaute Paris hotel pop up

4 Gucci Garden

The Gucci Garden pop-up store, museum and restaurant was discovery-commerce in its original form. This was a luxury retail experience that offered so much more – a full suite of creative inspirations from the archive museum of prints and personalised designer curations, to the treasure filled cabinets of curiosity, and the luxury space du jour – an Osteria!

Gucci Garden, Florence

5 Prada in China

Prada has finally got the digital memo. In December the luxury group launched its e-commerce store in China – after being at risk of being left behind according to Jing Daily – and this month the brand launched an ‘alternative’ travelling pop-up experience in Macau. The Prada Spirit is a luxurious traditional Italian café, with central bar area and high bar stools alongside cabinets for exclusive leather goods, that will take in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei between now and February for Chinese New Year, reports WWD.

The Prada Spirit pop-up, Macau for Chinese New Year

5 Boutique gym retail?

There are a handful of new boutique gyms opening this month in London and I like the look of the new Blok outpost in Shoreditch. Isn’t it about time we looked to the boutique gym brigade for a new style of wellness community retail, where brands such as OvertNYC or Phvlo can rent temporary spaces to launch influencer-led collections to engaged, niche communities.

Blok Gym, Shoreditch

6 Insta CK

The CK x Kardashian-Jenner #MyCalvins familial ad campaign launch was a zeitgeist moment to note: the day when influencer-commerce took over from physical retail. Who needs stores when you can click-to-buy via Instagram?

The Kardashian-Jenner sisters for CK’s #MyCalvins ad campaign

7 Lamyland at Selfridges

Selfridges pushes the retail experience envelope again this month with its Lamyland boxing gym and Corner Shop pop-up in collaboration with extreme creative muse Michelle Lamy. Part of the department store’s new Radical Luxury campaign, that asks what does new luxury mean today, the focus on boxing is intended to offer a differential view on luxury streetwear and the power of collaboration.

Lamyland at Selfridges, London

8 Kawaii DSM

Dover Street Market is having a kawaii moment. The new kawaii themed spring/summer collection by Comme des Garcons is the focus in-store and in the windows and it’s a plastic fantastic wonder.

Commes des Garcons kawaii VM at Dover Street Market

9 Gap’s culture-remixing

Gap is ticking ALL the diversity boxes with its latest #GapLogoRemix ad campaign/ music video featuring a host of young tastemakers from the worlds of film, TV, YouTube and social media. Aside from the 90s heyday merch, Gap is bankrolling a new era of ‘culture-remixing’ says AdAge. Could the brand finally be turning it around?

Gap Logo Remix 2018

10 H&M’s off-price marketplace

News just in! H&M is launching an off-price marketplace called Afound, dropping in Sweden first, both on-line and stores, sometime later this year. It’s about time too – with big shifts in consumer attitude towards trends such as circular fashion, thrift-chic, seasonless-style and cloud closets – H&M is well placed to set the tone for a new era of mass transparency. Described as a “style- and deal-hunting paradise” it’s hello to old stock from Arket, COS, & Other Stories, not to mention H&M’s countless designer collabs, plus a host of as-yet-unnamed Swedish labels. I’m thinking of a style-crush cross between Bicester Village, Depop and Vestaire Collective.

Here’s a round-up of January’s more interesting phygital retail bytes:

CES kick-starts the year with a host of innovative tech ideas and nascent, phygital developments to watch with retailers in mind. This year, wearables finally got exciting, the IoT (Internet of Things) got closer to reaching breaking point in our homes, and consumers saw how technology is ready to transform the shopping experience. My favourite round-ups from Bloomberg Business Week and Brand Channel touched on many key trends.

Estimote beacons

The Retail Big Show in New York closely follows CES, and the role of technology in stores increases with importance every year. This year, the show profiled eBay’s connected store concept, currently on trial at Rebecca Minkoff and Nordstrom stores, according to this report in Retail Design World, and magic mirrors were the top attraction according to Retailing Today’s review. Disruptive retail strategy was one of the show’s key take-outs for Retail Touchpoints while mobile apps that are enabling beacon technology uptake was top of the buzz list for CNBC.

Neiman Marcus has installed interactive inventory tables that blend into its footwear departments, and will spur sales conversions according to Luxury Daily.

Omni-channel is the word of 2015 for eBay, that has just launched its new sellers platform: Retail Associate Platform, according to WWD.

Mall rats are not dead, they are part of retail’s big phygital strategy, says Kevin McKenzie, Westfield’s global chief digital officer, who talks to the Business of Fashion about Westfield’s new World Trade Centre location in New York.

Virtual retail is a step closer thanks to Microsoft’s new Holo Lens headset. Here Dezeen suggests what might be possible.

Tommy Hilfiger has launched a digital showroom that is shaking up the fashion buying world.

Pinterest is gaining traction among advertisers as brands flock to the channel’s ‘Pinfluencers’, according to the Wall Street Journal. And stylish influential men are Pinterest’s new target, as the image curation site works on its search functionality with ‘geek’ content.

AdAge has a refreshing take on how Snapchat could kill the trend for consumer showrooming in stores via one-off snap coupons or scavenger hunt style retail promotions.

Fashion and beauty brands are combining user-generated content with discovery-commerce opportunites on Instagram. Joining the Insta-commerce party is Preen.Me, a platform that has recently run exclusive deals with Tweezerman and Bumble & Bumble, according to WWD (sub req).

The worlds of online and offline retail are merging with increasingly compelling examples of personalised product meets convenient service = winning combination.

Kate Spade eBay digital store front, New York

The phy-gital retail trend is here to stay, exemplified by early adopters such as eBay, Bonobos, FAB and more recently Etsy, Birchbox and the trailblazing eyewear specialist Warby Parker. These online pure-players have all dipped their digital toes in physical waters, opening showroom and pop-up style stores with largely successful results (Warby Parker says its eight stores sell an average $3,000 worth of product per square foot annually, according to the Wall Street Journal).

What’s interesting is that the phy-gital trend also works the other way. The flipside is that physical retailers are also enhancing the store experience with data-enriched shopping experiences that online retailers have been used to offering for years. As J Skyler Fernandes, MD of Simon Venture Group, said at the Wired Retail conference late last year, the mall is not dead, it just needs to embrace the digital natives that now shop there.

Now there are fresh innovations from online retailers that are taking the idea of showrooming to new levels.

Zappos wants to encourage customers to shop whenever, wherever and opened a 24/7 Holiday pop-up store in Las Vegas in partnership with e-commerce software specialist OrderWithMe. The showroom-style store mirrored what was available on the brand’s website and was a reference to the way consumers shop around the clock, globally. ‘You don’t go to Zappos.com at 3 am and they say, ‘We’re closed,” explained OrderWithMe CEO Jonathan Jenkins.

Zappos pop-up showroom with OrderWithMe

Virtual stores with physical locations are popping up in New York and London. I loved the 3D scan virtual store experiment from ShowStudio’s collaboration with MachineA in spring 2014, for its avant-garde approach to interactive retailing. More traditional in the showroom sense was the DL1961 digital denim pop-up that appeared in New York’s Meatpacking area for the Holiday period offering body-scanning, virtual fit advice and payment/delivery options in a single booth. ‘The DL1961 Digital Showroom is a way to take a product like ours that is based on touch and feel and translate it in a digital space,’ the brand’s creative director Sarah Ahmed told New York’s The Daily.

DL1961 digital showroom

As retail in 2015 re-invents itself courtesy of the digital age, physical stores and digital shopping habits will continue to merge. Personalisation, device-enhanced customer service and clever economies of scale such as localised click & collect (FarFetch is ahead of the curve on that one), will be the new rules of dynamic retailing. Virtual showrooming, billboards for store-fronts and data-crunching personal shoppers will all play a part in the phy-gitalisation of the retail experience in 2015.

Retail and media are converging as pop-ups become more about branded billboards than transient retail locations.

The notion of pop-ups is a well-trodden retail strategy. The latest approach to physical, location based branding is walk-in, immersive billboards to support a phygital campaign.

Appear Here spaces at Old Street

Scene marketing

‘We match ideas to spaces online and help brands make their ideas travel around the world,’ says Ross Bailey, founder and CEO of property locating marketplace Appear Here. Real innovation and the future of retail is less about omni-channel and more about allowing great ideas to happen across multiple channels, says Bailey.

Bailey Nelson, Appear Here pop-up, Old Street

Online brands are becoming retailers. Physical spaces are becoming media. ‘Retail can be whatever you want it to be. As these lines blur, any brand can use a pop-up to meet its audience at the right time in the right place, at the right moment,’ says Bailey. He cites his company’s recent collaboration with hit US show Homeland – creating a fake CIA lie-detector ‘scene’ in a pop-up window – as a good example of how to market a DVD release.

Homeland live pop-up window

Retail match-makers

Like Appear Here, Storefront is a US-based pop-up service that matches vacant retail property with brands looking for empty spaces.

Dubbed the ‘Airbnb for retail’ by TechCrunch, Storefront allows landlords with free retail space to rent it out to interested parties on flexible terms, whether that’s full stores, pop-ups for days/weeks/months or just shelf space. Earlier this month the 2013 start-up announced $7.3m in funding led by Spark Capital, also angel investors for Warby Parker. After a year of trading and over 1000 ‘hires’ for retail locations in New York and San Francisco, Storefront’s co-founder and CEO Erik Eliason says for every dollar spent, his merchants are making $7 in sales. Storefont says it is now aiming for its pop-up locations to be more than simply retail. As Storefront expands into Los Angeles, there are opportunities for online or mobile brands to launch new products and showcase them to consumers by finding spaces with lots of guaranteed foot traffic, says Spark general partner Mo Koyfman.

In March 2014, LVMH owned Kenzo partnered with the Blue Marine Foundation, an ocean conservation charity for a ‘No Fish No Nothing’ campaign as part of its spring/summer 14 collection. To coincide with the micro-collection launch, Kenzo launched a digital pop-up in Paris, where passersby could visualize the plight of fish and then buy pieces of the collection as donations. Viewers watched virtual fish swimming the ocean-blue hued store-front screens and over a few minutes 30% of them disappeared, returning whenever a purchase was made in-store or on the campaign microsite.

‘Kenzo’s virtual store front was a clever marketing move that allowed the brand to simultaneously have one foot in the physical retail world and one in the digital one,’ says Rachel Arthur, founder of Fashion and Mash, a marketing blog.

Kenzo No Fish No Nothing store front

Frinctionless shopfronts

The Kate Spade Saturday collaboration with eBay for a pop-up interactive store-front in New York in 2013, was a lesson in frictionless retail, according to Kate Ancketill, CEO and founder of GDR, a creative intelligence agency. ‘It’s a convergence case study that merges retail with advertising. It’s more than just a shop window. There are interactive elements that measure footfall into the store as well as engagement with eBay via mobile. It’s not a billboard, it’s not e-commerce and yet it is all these things,’ she says.

Kate Spade eBay digital store front, New York

‘Brands are blurring the lines between online and offline so as to gain the same levels of engagement in the real world that social media is frequently enabling,’ says Arthur. Smart brands such as adidas and Kate Spade Saturday through to Toms and Rebecca Minkoff are trialing virtual-store fronts, while the concept is still new; it also drives interest from passersby, not to mention global press. ‘As more surfaces become interfaces, and the role of the screen evolves, I expect to see more of this from big players’ she says.

* Pop-ups are going phygital. Brands need to think about how they can turn empty spaces into walk-in, interactive, live advertising environments. If customers can make purchases even better, but the focus should be for brands to transition their media spend from billboards to retail spaces. Windows are being reinvented as physical embodiments of websites. Bring in gesture-control, touch-screen elements and scannable content that can be personalized and brands are able to create an omni-channel experience that resonates with digitally savvy consumers who like to mix both on- and off-line worlds.

Since fashion is now shared instantly across social media, it’s no wonder how we shop for it has become more instant too. From Instagram to Pinterest and Tumblr, these platforms have become a visual marketplace for fashionistas, brands and retailers. Most important are the style leaders or ‘taste-makers’ that other users follow – and they’re the ones responsible for a new Shazam-style of shopping.

Snap it, search it, buy it

Just as another season’s month-long fashion week circus kicks off, there is a raft of new apps that target the street-style set with instant-hit fashion, at the click of a photo search. I’m calling this the ‘Shazamification of shopping’, since the practice of snapping what someone is wearing, then searching, then buying it, mimics the music identifying app Shazam. Last year Shazam announced it would broaden its service by recognising content from TV shows, so that when people ‘Shazam’ a show, they can link through to buy items worn by presenters or actors. Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s CEO, told The Guardian: “We have the ability to identify the product in a TV show so that when somebody Shazams it, they could find out where a presenter’s dress is from in one click.” Not only does this ‘search and shop’ business model look set to change the way we consume TV, it is also having an effect on how we shop for fashion.

Shazam copycats
After 26 year-old computer science graduate Jenny Griffiths launched Snap Fashion in 2012, others have followed her ground-breaking photo-search shopping app that allows users to snap an outfit or magazine editorial and search for similar items available online.

Asap54

ASAP54 launches on February 28th and is almost identical to Snap Fashion in its image-led search functionality, however it is more sophisticated in the way it allows the user to identify a type of garment or fabric to facilitate a more accurate search. Founder Daniela Cecilio previewed the app at a recent DECODED networking event and told the audience she launched ASAP54 as a way of processing what the human eye can see but with the power of an online retail database to search for items that match the visual. Apparently if you’re not happy with the algorithmically generated search results you can select an option for a ‘human’ fashion expert to step in and make suggestions and crowdsource it out to ASAP54’s social community. (ASAP54 has just announced $3million of funding and was profiled yesterday on Business Of Fashion.)

There are others following suit too. StyleEyes is another Shazam-style shopping app that allows users to snap, search and buy, organizing results into price and discounted options – any encouragement to click to purchase!

Taste-makers’ influence
Blame it on the taste-makers who pin where others follow. eBay relaunched its US home page in October with a taste-makers make over, advising users to ‘Follow It – Find It’ through the marketplace’s new hotlist of curators. The initiative (now called eBay Today) was spearheaded by Michael Philips Moskowitz, founder of taste-maker start-up Bureau of Trade who is now eBay’s chief curator and editorial director.

For some retail brands it’s a race to find the best influencers to follow. I’m a big fan of Nuji and everyone loves Lyst of course. Now even J Crew and Zara are on to tapping the ‘right’ people for their taste-graph influence. And then there was DisneyRollerGirl’s Tumblr -esque collab with Gap.

The latest trend is for shopping sites that merge the Shazam-style snap-and-search function with the influence of taste-makers. Keep is a new platform that fills the click-to-purchase gap on Instagram. Launched last month, Keep follows 100 of Instagram’s most stylish fashionistas and helps users find out where to buy the fashion they’re wearing in their posts. For example, recently Lena Dunham posted a picture of herself in a Strokes tee. On Keep users can buy the same product on Etsy, then like it, or keep it via their own Pinterest-style board on the Keep platform. It’s basically Instagram-fuelled shopping advice via the Keep staffers who do all the leg work!

Even more fashiony is MuseStyle, which also launched in January. The site’s focus is street-style stars, influential bloggers and fashion muses – you can follow their style and recommendations as well as shop the looks via unobtrusive clicks. At the moment I’m loving the on-trend posts by Natalie Kingham of Matches and the polished glamour of Taylor Tomasi-Hill.

And it was just a matter of time before the original taste-maker fashionista website, Net-a-Porter got a whole lot more social. Last fashion week The Netbook launched, letting (select) users see what others are buying, liking and admiring from a pool of visible global fashionistas, aka fellow members of the Netbook community. Alison Loehnis, managing director of Net-A-Porter, said the app was a more visual way for fashion fans to discover and shop products, inspired by the global fashion community.

Magazines merge with stores
Magazines have also jumped on the ‘search for it’ reader appeal. Lucky Magazine was the first to market in 2012 with its taste-maker shopping platform MyLuckyMag that showcases what power-users are liking, sharing and shopping for. Now, Glamour Magazine has launched a similar search and shop hashtag #GlamourFashionScanner that can be used across any of its social media feeds and is hosted on its Google+ platform. This live and direct fashion advice service allows users to search where to buy outfits they like – tapping directly into the magazine’s pool of editors for insider know-how.

But what does it all mean?
I’m watching how consumers are shopping on their mobiles for instant-hit, street-style fashion. As the traditional bi-annual fashion cycle morphs into a constant stream of newness and fashion shows are recognized more as a publicity tool than anything else, the process of shopping for style is becoming controlled by clicks and thumb scrolls. Soon that will be voice-control and hand-gestures as wearables like Google Glass become more widespread. My tip for the next phase of all this? Watch out for Glashion, launching in the US soon…